Always Before, Light Gathered
Rent from DeepDyve- Always Before, Light Gathered
Always Before, Light Gathered
The acquaintance, a poet, did stop by that afternoon.Her apparent role was to discover the bodies.The Washington Post
Always before, light gathered where I stood as if each thing mattered.
Now it won’t, the moment a collapsed box whose doll-like tenants
scatter on the ground, thrown riders, like the dead I found
ten years ago: a mother and her son. Nothing to be done.
No way to stop the film loop my brain replays, mastering each image
as it darkens from the center like the wooden floor they lay upon. [End Page 86]
Race from that house— run into the summer street, scream for help—
run away a thousand times, and still the scene follows.
I hardly knew her, but this much I could tell: she finished her book
and her boy and herself. People say she took him with her,
as if any mother would— but where were they going without their blood? [End Page 87]
Jody Bolz is the author of A Lesson in Narrative Time (Gihon Books) and the forthcoming novella-in-verse Shadow Play (Turning Point). Her poems have appeared widely in journals such as the American Scholar, North American Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry East as well as in literary anthologies. Since 2002 she has edited Poet Lore, founded in 1889.
